


In Fury Like the Lion, In Vengeance Like the Lamb

by orphan_account



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, French History RPF, French Revolution RPF
Genre: Childbirth Imagery, Emotional Infidelity, F/M, F/M- not relationship focused, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Sexism, Psychological Trauma, Thermidor, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-12-28 22:44:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21144452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Women reserve a special hatred for men who have shared their table and betrayed them, Annette thought. A bed was one thing, but a table was something very different.For that reason alone, Annette came to see Robespierre die.





	In Fury Like the Lion, In Vengeance Like the Lamb

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fanfeline](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fanfeline/gifts).

> This is a gift for the charming [fanfeline](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fanfeline/profile), whose post on tumblr about the story to be made of whether Annette Duplessis might have gone to watch Robespierre's execution, after blaming him for Camille and Lucile's deaths ([based on the content of this letter](https://ohmycamilledesmoulins.tumblr.com/post/20662524456/robespierre-is-it-not-enough-to-have-assassinated)). Thus this story was born.

Women reserve a special hatred for men who have shared their table and betrayed them, Annette thought. A bed was one thing: a woman did not assume that she necessarily shared a heart or a mind, let alone a purpose, with the man she shared a bed with. Beds, after all, could be places of violence and warfare as often as they could be bowers of warmth and pleasure, places for risky strategies as often as mutual negotiations.  
  
A table, though. A table was different.  
  
Annette knew well enough how men talked of the table, the kitchen, the dining room: these alone were the legitimate sphere of women, will they or no, and God help those few women with more than Roman courage who dared dispute it. Being so, however, the hearth was sacred and inviolable: the haven of discussions held nowhere else, a testimony of her craft and merit and devotion, the place in which she nourished her children the better that her own humble dreams might be carried forth by them. To breach such faith was to wage war upon her, to disturb the sanctity of the one place that was hers and hers alone, in which she was safe and her will inviolate. These men, with their Greek gods and Roman heroes, with their Herakles and their Marcus Aurelius spoke platitudes about the peerlessness of Cornelia Africana! These men, and none more so than the Incorruptible himself, with that spiteful boy ever at his side, that bitter, wrathful facsimile of her- _his_, for Heaven’s sake- beautiful Camille, talked of the virtues of marriage and fidelity while spitting in the face of Juno! They preached warmth and love for wives and mothers and sisters, but were they not to a one as cold in their blood as those crawling things that burrow through the mud and refuse, feasting upon rot and living in the cavernous pit of a corpse’s belly?  
  
God, how Annette despised them! Her grief had curdled like the rot in a wound. At first she felt only its pain: Camille ripped from her side as though they had been grafted together, his loss peeling skin and flesh down to the bone; Lucile- oh, her sweet, gentle daughter- akin more to a cut through the vault of Annette’s womb, her dear girl wrenched free, the cord between them brutally severed. She had not felt an emptiness quite like it since those strange, first days after Lucile’s birth, in which she became a separate creature, held in the arms and to the breast. It was the agony of this second, permanent separation that had filled the cavernous hollow left by their loss. That poisoned her very blood. When Annette looked into the mirror now, she was shocked to find the only these reddened eyes, this whitened face, as the only evidence of this disease when she rather thought instead to find the frothing mouth of a rabid beast.  
  
God, this hatred, this rage she was left with! How it snapped and snarled even at the most innocent provocation. But Robespierre, it was Robespierre, in the end, that Annette’s teeth longed for. It was he who had betrayed them, and all this venom in her veins knew of it. All the venom in her veins animated her. It thirsted only for him.  
  
Oh, Robespierre! Robespierre who spoke of ancients and yet knew nothing of Hera, of Medusa, of Artemis! Women betrayed, all of them, how cold and fearful in their wrath.

**1785**

Before the Revolution, in that golden age in which sorrow and fear were but distant things: imagined, sympathised with when they befell others, but more or less inconsequential to the beautiful simplicity of Annette’s life. Everything then seemed so very far away: the king and queen in Versailles, as unreachable as clouds upon the horizon, tragedy so distant a misfortune that, even as she wept for the unfortunate, the act seemed rather more like weeping for some doomed victim out of Racine or Corneille. In those days, all was a boundless, complicated love with little to infringe upon it. A love as multi-faceted, as brilliant and hard, as the diamonds worn ‘round the plump neck of a queen. Annette wore them well indeed. They suited her.  
  
The truth: like all decent women, Annette loved her family. She loved Claude. She loved him first, before their children were born, as a bird comes to love the hand that holds the grain: timidly, and then with growing confidence, but always with the subtle urge to take flight at too quick a gesture, too hard a voice. Later, after Adèle and Lucile, she loved him as one loves all comfortable things: the mattress that yields to the shape of one’s body, the patched, fraying robe worn butter-soft with use until it settles over the shoulders like an embrace. When Adèle was born, she loved her immediately, wholly, with a voraciousness almost startling in its totality: loved her as beasts are wont to love their young, with a profound tenderness and such fierce protectiveness that, the first time she saw some great, uncouth boar of a man cast his gaze upon her, Annette thought she might launch herself at him and tear out his throat with the tiny, blunt points of her teeth. But Lucile, oh! Lucile! Lucile was her treasure, the whole of her heart. A mother mustn’t have favourites and yet, God help her, Annette did. Well, what of it then? Did not men devote more of their limited store of love to the sons that bore their names and grew best within their own shadows? So it was for Annette: it was not simply that Lucile bore such resemblance to her that she was like a stamp set upon soft wax, but rather that in heart and mind they were so very similar as to be more like sisters than mother and daughter. Adèle was her beloved flesh and blood, her first child, but Lucile was the companion of her very soul.  
  
The other truth, then, the hidden one: she loved Camille. Loved him chastely but immoderately, as one must love all hopeless ideals, as sculptors and painters must love the subjects they fashion but which can never reciprocate their gaze, their touch. How to describe Camille in those days? Like black coffee in a chipped cup: warmth and bitterness, the constant risk of cutting your lips if you pressed them to the wrong places. A man so fragile that you could at once see all his flaws and cracks yet treasure him still and fear that, in dropping him, he might come apart entirely beyond repair. Camille with the sleek, smooth curls he let tangle like black briar upon his shoulders, with his great, dark eyes and the rough grain of his coarsely shaved cheeks that chafed her thin-skinned hands red whenever he bent to kiss them. Her hopeless, impossible love.  
  
How could she speak of the blessed wonder of those days? How to convey the fullness of her heart? A memory, perhaps- Annette’s most treasured- the one worn smooth from the amount of times she had turned it over in her mind. A memory held within the beating soft of her heart, now surrounded by the shield she had made for herself of cold rage and wrathful despair, held as the pearl is held upon a pliant bed of flesh, enclosed within the ugly, rippled hardness of the oyster’s shell.  
  
A memory…  
  
Summer, when they were all piled into the cart for the journey to their country house: she and Claude, Adèle, Lucile, Camille and the Barnauds. The smell of grass baking in the summer sun and the warm straw of the women’s bonnets. Lucile laughing and tossing her curls, pointing out the flight of birds, utterly disinterested in the world of adults: a creature of pure being in those days. Camille poking gentle fun at her, his voice bouncing nervously over some outrageous tale of his. The length of his arm, strong and slim, pressed against her own. Whenever Annette breathed, she took him inside her: the scent of his skin, his hair, the freshness of his sweat. God, if she could but bottle the scent of that day: warm grass and straw, a young girl’s laughter, the sweetness of her own perfume, _Camille_.  
  
The families picnicked under the spreading shade of elm trees, on a great square of cloth. There was cold roast chicken and leftover bits of pork, a fine terrine. There was a loaf of thick white bread, cheese so soft beneath its rind that it was more like eating spilled cream and a fine wine that left all the adults drowsy and nodding in the heat. There was an entire basket overflowing with fruit so ripe that their juice ran down fingers and wrists and forearms, leaving them gloriously sticky and sweet to the taste. Later, Camille- always sleepless while others dozed, or opportunistic if one were inclined to be less charitable- would steal a moment to suck Annette’s fingers into his mouth and lick between them, now with the point and now with the flat of his clever, stumbling tongue, and tell her how divine Demeter must taste, how surely he had sampled the flesh of a goddess now and would know no other). There was a fine, divinely sweet wine that left all but the children drowsy and nodding in the heat.  
  
That night they held their rustic revels. Lucile wore a flower crown upon her head, and Camille murmured Demeter in Annette’s ear as he passed by, his smile laying a kiss upon the lobe. M. Barnaud had brought his violin with him, and he set about playing some few pieces for their pleasure. Camille, always the consummate performer despite his stutter, drew them in with tales of shepherds and shepherdesses, of innocent country dances. Made boisterous and elevated with wine, he drew them into a simple _branle_, exaggerating its steps with a laughing, bright-eyed Lucile for partner. Perhaps it was that very moment when Annette saw her own autumn dawning, even as her daughter ripened towards a summer just as warm and glowing as this one. If some women might have been jealous, or sought to avert the inevitable by way of perfumes and concoctions and powders, that night Annette only smiled and pressed Claude’s hand. Of course, it was not Lucile that Camille came for later that evening: indeed, in those days he paid Lucile no mind than a man might to his sister. Nor did he approach Annette as though they were playing the games of aristocrats. No, rather, he approached her with all the boldness of a man who has already accepted his place in a particular tale, but who nevertheless savours his thankless role. Camille always liked stories, Annette knew, and romances in particular. Thus he neither wanted nor expected more than their hushed laughter in the shadows, the chaste promise of brushed lips, the full weight of knowing all they might have of one another here and now, and knowing equally that, at times, three-quarters of pleasure lies in not succumbing to it.  
  
That summer, then, was a place to which Annette retreated periodically and in which, perhaps, she lingered too long at times. There were parts of it she knew she changed: little intonations, the smallest of actions, the colour of a ribbon Camille had snatched playfully from her hair (it was blue, she knew, but in 1789 she stained it green instead). There were other parts that she overturned entirely, before quickly setting them back to rights (sometimes it was not Lucile that Camille danced the _branle_ with, but her, and the strength of his arms as he pinned her against the wall was more than just promise made half in jest, half in earnest). That summer: both her treasure and her comfort, a warm weight that she drew over herself as a little girl will hide from monsters beneath her blankets. Annette, however, was no fool. She knew that moment for what it was: the beginning of her autumn, the first yellowing leaf to fall from the tree.  
  
What she did not, could not know then: it was the beginning of all of their autumns.  
  
And some would never reach winter. 

**1789-1790**

If she were asked- though she never was- Annette would say she was a woman of sensibility, and moreover of simplicity. Her books and her embroidery, her friends and her children: these were more than enough for her. It was not that she was heedless or uncaring, or that she did not understand the changes coming over the nation, but rather that she considered her duty to Claude and their family before any she might be said to owe France. Like all of her friends in the earliest days of the Revolution- before, even, it was called a revolution at all- she viewed these rumblings as no more than distant thunder upon the horizon of her existence. The presaging of a storm, more an indication that she ought to fetch a shawl than the ominous suggestion of the Biblical torrents soon to batter down upon them all. If she were asked- though she never was- she would not say that she wanted liberty so much as happiness, and that perhaps Claude was right to suggest that happiness could not be fostered by a king who was not accountable to his people. She would have said that she wanted everyone to know at least a portion of the joy and comfort she had known. That she believed in the king, as did they all, but that she believed far more in Camille and the men who surrounded him. That if Camille said a thing could be done, it would be so.  
  
It was Lucile, growing to womanhood in the midst of such times as these, who was the more political one amongst them. She understood all these wild things as though she had taken them in at the breast, and would hold forth at the slightest opportunity. Annette watched her give away her dolls and her frills, exchanging them for Rousseau and plain ribbons, for quills and journals. She watched the dimpled roundedness of her cheeks and arms vanish and sharpen into chin and cheekbones, into fine-boned wrists and delicate arms. She sat behind Lucile on certain mornings, just to retain the simple pleasure of combing the wealth of her hair ‘til its smooth and shining waves poured down her back, let Lucile kiss her and call her Maman in a voice grown rich and studiously serious. She rested her chin upon her daughter’s shoulder so that their faces were reflected side by side in the glass. They looked so alike, alike enough that Camille’s gaze still settled it’s heavy weight upon her even as it increasingly fell and lingered longer upon Lucile. Lucile, for her part, was too bright and shining a thing to be considered some dark reflection of Annette’s own, irreverent soul. No, Lucile had made herself, crafted herself from the raw matter of which she was made. She was a force, a turning of seasons, a living, breathing duality: fierce joy and happy rage, both the height of summer and the depths of winter.  
  
_Demeter_, Camille had called Annette, meaning to flatter her for her motherhood, for the life-bearing nature of her body. Now, however, she saw a deeper truth to it within their own, private mythology: that Lucile was not the only one honed into something sharper by those times, something fit for an outstretched neck. Something a little colder, a little more beautiful, a little- if Annette were truly honest- terrifying. The years, the petty indignities, the love Camille felt for freedom and for justice, fell upon him in 1789 like some awful malady. How pale, then, the skin once rich and brown from summer sun; how sharp the high bones of his cheeks and the length of his jaw, less akin, now, to the fineness of birds than to weapons made of flint. There were shadows beneath his eyes, as though their darkness had merely run to pool upon the soft skin beneath. His hair grew wild, untended, tangled with sleeplessness and tugged in frustration and whipped by the pace at which he ran through the streets. Something of his boyishness, his humour, remained but it sat upon his face like a tilted mask. She had thought him like Dionysus once: joyous and willful and dangerous, all flushed cheeks and sprawled legs, red-stained lips and wine-dark curls. Now there were times when she looked upon him and saw instead a coldness and a violence, hewn stone and clenched fists, the juice of pomegranates and hair the colour of spilled ink.  
  
Sometimes she watched him watching Lucile and her mind turned towards scattered flowers and the black depths of the earth yawning open to swallow a young girl.  
  
The world, however, was changing for all of them. It had crept up imperceptibly on Annette like the fine lines beginning to map her face. Unlike the slow alterations upon the human face, or the shaping of stone beneath some gentle, constant tide, the aging of the world was a terrible thing. No, it had in it something of the joyous brutality of giving birth; it had in it the sloughing off of skin, the eruption of some moist and smooth-fleshed insect from its hardened skin. There was an excitement, yes, but a fear, too: her world was a well-worn, comfortable thing, it was a skin she had grown into, and what if she did not want to become larger, or different? What if she wanted everything to stay as it had been in the summer of 1785? What if she felt herself like Cassandra, with every possibility opened up before her and no one to tell, the fear of it all growing and towering, height upon height, like the darkening clouds of an autumn storm?  
  
“We will have to submit to silence just as we must submit to the gun of a thief,” Camille said one night, reading aloud from his latest pamphlet. “But if the sovereign exercised arbitrary power against me, such power is only the right of the strongest; it would be just as well founded for me to strangle him with his noose and prevent it if I can.”  
  
“Well,” Claude said later that night, as they dressed for bed. “It would suit that boy to overturn the entire world, wouldn’t it?”  
  
“How do you mean?”  
  
“He has eyes for our Lucile, does he not? Would it not bring them closer together, into the same sphere, as it were, to upset the order of things?” Perhaps Claude saw how she looked at him then, for he flapped his hands at her like a man shooing pigeons. “A king is one thing, my dear, for a king must be a father to his people. If the people are crying out for him, he must listen and come to their aid just as a father should aid his children. But I am speaking of other questions, of how far one might pursue that fatal logic of his…”  
  
The habitual tenderness between them reasserted itself then, the warmth of long-affection wrapping ‘round Annette’s shoulders like a blanket against the creeping cold. “I do not suppose,” she said, ducking her head to tuck the loose tumble of her stray curls beneath her nightcap. “That Camille is courting a revolt only so he might also court our daughter.”  
  
“There are stranger things that men have done for love.”  
  
_And how would you know that?_ she wanted to ask. _Heaven and earth are easier to move than kings, and which of anyt of those would you ever have moved for me?_ It was an ugly, nagging thought, like the prick of a thorn or the sting of a splinter, a spike long-since plucked, an invisible wound still tender and itching. She slipped between the sheets and lay waiting for his weight, his warmth beside her. Stiffened, perhaps, when his hand cupped her breast through the thin fabric of her nightgown. Inhaled a little too sharply. Claude, who had moved neither heaven nor earth nor kings, stopped and tucked his head against her shoulder. His hand retreated to settle upon her waist.  
  
“Our Lucile is not for him, my dear,” he said. “She is worth rather more than that, and will have as many offers as her mother.”  
  
“Perhaps more.”  
  
“Impossible.”  
  
She smiled in the dark where he would not see it, and turned to kiss his forehead so he might feel it instead. A few moments passed. Annette waited for his breathing to deepen, the weight of his arm to become a leaden bar across her belly, so she might be alone with her own thoughts. She thought the moment was close, that he was gone into the land of sleep, when his arm tightened and drew her closer. Tales of escaping naiads, of Aphrodite and Hephaestus, came to mind; her skin prickled.  
  
“We would do well,” he said, a question lurking behind the evenness of his voice. “To be circumspect in our relationship with M. Desmoulins for the present, and perhaps to withdraw some of our attentions from him.”  
  
“Why, M. Duplessis, just two days ago I heard you boasting that he had connections with Mirabeau.”  
  
“Mirabeau is a count, and too great a giant to be easily felled. I hear he is also an excellent gambler. You, on the other hand, married a capitalist, Madame: I am by my very nature cautious, which has served our family well.”   
  
“Can we abandon him, so easily? Camille is your friend as much as mine.”  
  
“Is he?”  
  
Claude’s voice was so calm, so devoid of judgment, that Annette could not but curl into his side and tighten their embrace. She pushed her face into the softness of his breast. His kiss, when it came, brushed her curls like the benediction of a priest.  
  
“I do not say cast him aside entirely, my dear,” Claude said gently, turning her face towards his, though the dark of the night lay too thick to see one another. “I say only to be watchful. His rhetoric tilts at revolution far more than insurrection.”  
  
Despite her words, her mad, inconstant words to them both, there was a relief to being robbed of the decision to withdraw from Camille. To be able to conceal herself behind politesse and perfumed letters. For his part, Camille reeled and gyred between the embrace of a crowd for whom he played both lover and beloved, his veneration of her, and his accompanying longing for Lucile. Annette thought him like a man playing the pianoforte while only able to hear its highest and lowest notes.  
  
“I would have you both, you know I would,” he said one night, slipping off her gloves to kiss her hands, “The loveliest and best of women in all of France: I would share all the King’s wealth, but in love you will find me avaricious, Madame.”  
  
“In love?” she asked.  
  
Only to be met with the darkening of his eyes. “And other matters.”  
  
The truth, however, was that she feared Camille now. She feared this world they sought to make. Men, she thought, had too much of violence in them: that was why God made it so they could never birth as women do. When men were brought to bear of all that they conceived, they spilled more blood than any woman ever had upon her sheets. They tore and broke and destroyed, and if some good should come of it, if some new dawn should crest between their thighs, Annette thought it more a matter of chance than intent. Of luck. How many men had died, she wondered, bringing forth dreams? Were they more numerous than those women who died in childbirth? How many of those dreams dawned blue and stillborn? Yet when they lived, how many other children did they drag down merely to assure their own survival, as the cuckoo will push all others from its stolen nest?  
  
This, then, was her fear. The King had dreams, she was sure of it: so many that he was lost and wandering amongst them, that he could not possibly deliver of them all, though he would fight for them nonetheless. Mirabeau must have his own, though craftiness made him more like those young women who artfully hide their secrets under skirts and clever padding and drapery ‘til it was time at last to push and strain. Camille, though, Camille was like those girls in the countryside who walked about like goddesses, proud of the thighs they’d spread and the curving fullness of their bellies, moving about with swaying hips and milk-swollen breasts, with flushed cheeks and raised chins. Yet none of these men, so fertile to the stuff of dreams, could conceive of the tragedies that accompanied them like twins in the womb. They knew only anticipation, not a new mother’s constant fear or an experienced mother’s resignation.  
  
If Annette’s mind, in those early days, was occupied like Cassandra with visions of a terrible, unalterable path into the future, then Lucile was instead caught by all the ecstacies of the Pythia. While Annette moved with trepidation through the streets and peeped from the windows at even the slightest hint of raised voices, Lucile danced like a pale flame amongst the throng, ready to fling wide the door to chaos. She spoke endlessly of the events of the day, in a new language comprised of ‘the people’ and of ‘rights’ and of ‘law’, words she had borrowed both from her voracious reading and the common tongue. And she wrote. Oh, how she wrote. She might accede with some species of grudging tolerance to Annette’s more gentle advances upon the need for calm and succoring the poorest of women. In the end, however, she retreated to her own council and to her writing, filling page after page with a childish script she had never corrected, ‘til the cuffs of her gowns were stained black, the side of one finger worn and callused where she had balanced her pen. It was inevitable, then, that she should fall in love with Camille, that she should reciprocate his long-held desires. Annette had known it from the moment that Camille crossed the threshold after the Bastille fell. Once upon a time he had been the prince of spring, the master of summer, but the Camille that finally caught her daughter’s attention was the Camille of green cockades and falling stones, the Camille of bloody gutters and hearts on pikes and bodies swinging from lantern posts.  
  
_Am I a bad woman?_ Annette asked herself one night, watching the two of them deep in conversation and feeling, for the first time, old and worn and far, far away from them both. A cut thread of flesh and fate. But no, it was only that Lucile had been a child and was now a woman grown. The looks she gave Camille, both wondering and calculated, confirmed it: Lucile had heard the rattling of the wheels and the thunder of hooves, she had felt the earth split open beneath her feet as he came to greet her, and unlike the Persephone of myth, she opened her arms to welcome him. 

  
**1791-1792**

Perhaps, Annette thought, the lesson of the Persephone myth was not so simple. Perhaps, rather than an explanation of the seasons, it was a tale of life and how it perseveres even when it seems trampled and ground down to the very dust. Perhaps it spoke not just of the year and the passage of time, but also of the cycle of violence and renewal.  
  
Thus it seemed to Annette, in the first year of Lucile’s marriage. Those months seemed to fall upon them all like a second summer, warm and heavy and golden, like dripping honey in the sunshine. Everything seemed possible, everything bright. The first sip of sweetness was the joy of the wedding itself, Camille and Lucile’s bright smiles, their faces so wet with tears that their cheeks tasted salt to the kiss. That night, Claude had taken Annette to bed, just as Camille must have been bedding his own dear companion, and they made love as though renewing in flesh in their old and rusting vows. Lucile came to visit only a day or so after, apple-cheeked and wide-eyed and laughing, and caught Annette by the hand to draw her close, hissing, _‘Mother, you did not tell me everything’_ before they both embraced and fell to laughing about the sheer happy absurdity of pleasure and desire and men.  
  
In the months that followed, it seemed as though that first joy only spread. Like a stone cast into the midst of deep water, it rippled outward, ever-expanding. There were the nights gathered ‘round the table, Danton and Gabrielle, Camille and Lucile, Robespierre alone but placed strategically near enough to Adèle that they might converse. Oh, Robespierre in those early days: his stiffly curled and powdered wig slightly incongruous amongst them all (Danton, often bewigged himself in those days, usually found his askew or lost by the end of such evenings). Robespierre with his rather frail and lovely face and the upturned nose of a little boy, the finely cut clothes that ought to have softened his sharpness but served instead to emphasise it, his ponderous, ornate speech that somehow only rendered him the more endearing.  
  
Camille, of course, was an exciting man to be around: he could never be less. As for Danton and Robespierre, one supposed them like ice and fire: two elements in such fundamental opposition that they could not possibly coexist, that they must come together for no purpose but to destroy one another. They were, Annette thought (though at times she chided herself for believing herself capable of much understanding of the political sphere) two different forms of justice: one the natural justice of Man, unbounded by much more than inclination and instinct, the other as hard and unyielding as the stone the first laws were engraved upon. Camille, however, held them both in perfect tension, in perfect balance. Perhaps it was for love of him that they endured it, for they coddled him with the tenderness that men sometimes show to boys and he, always hungry for love of any kind, allowed it and sipped from their very hands. Allowed them, she sometimes supposed, if only because it was he who held the power and they who never suspected it. He said this or that and they teased, but listened. He provoked and needled and forced them to defend their positions as if he were in the fencing studio. He argued and cajoled and whined until they must work together to defeat him, or see the inherent similarity of their position. Drunk on sweet wine, for Camille must ever suck the sweetness of the flower and not the marrow from the bone, he would upset chairs just to get to them, to drag them close and tuck his face against Danton’s thick, soft neck or bow his forehead against Robespierre’s head and nuzzle him. And oh, how it terrified her to watch him, as surely as if he had placed his arm between the fanged jaws of a bear, or wrapped them ‘round the neck of a lion.  
  
“Does it not worry you,” Annette asked Lucile one night, as they lay on her bed together, her daughter’s head resting against the soft of her belly just as it had when Lucie was a child. “How he is now?”  
  
“He is Camille, as I am, as he is me. We are one and the same,” Lucile answered, laughing. “I fear him as I fear myself: that is, not at all. Besides, Camille charms everyone. Even Marat.”  
  
And it was true. Camille seemed to dance through the havoc and tears of those years, when all the great facades of the world they had known, a world that had seemed eternal and inescapable to Annette, were being torn down and replaced by newer edifices, just as the old and fearsome titans of the social order were cast down and replaced by the younger gods with whom they once kept company. A queen exchanged for Liberté, a gilded palace for a riding school, the princes of fairytales for the heroes of myth.  
  
More than ever, Annette felt herself cut adrift from the world and from Camille, like a twin accustomed to the closeness of the womb left terrified and confused at finding themselves to indeed be separate beings after all. There were times when Claude read the news aloud after dinner that she listened to it as one listens to a story; times, too, when standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Lucile in the gallery of Assembly, or joining her at the Cordeliers, she felt as though she were watching some new performance by the Comédie-Française. If Camille sometimes came stumbling across the threshold disheveled and bloodied, spattered in dirt and baring his teeth in triumph, even that had more in it of seeing some beloved character come to life. That same barrier of unreality. He lived, yes, and danced upon the ends of the Revolution’s strings as they all did, yet how easy they were to cut. How like the breathless terror of reading of great events and greater heroes, of waiting for their inevitable fates that the capricious gods mete out to all men who stand too tall amongst their fellows.   
  
_Not now, not now,_ went her nightly prayers. _Not ever. God, make of Camille an exception._  
  
She never thought to include Lucile in this litany, for women were beneath the notice of these modern gods.

**1792-1793**

A sort of silence settled over Paris, a strange and stifling weight. It reminded Annette of the long, tarrying hours before a midsummer storm, as everyone awaited the drumming of rain upon the windows. Sometimes, she felt more like a little girl again, holding her breath to count the thunder’s distance. At other times, she felt as though a great, heavy hand were clapped across her mouth to drag her into the shadows. When she met the eyes of people passing in the street, she thought they, too, were captives of the same force. Sometimes, it seemed, the hand slipped and the grip faltered, and when that happened the entire city convulsed and writhed and screamed in the scant moments before it was smothered yet again.  
  
It was not Annette’s way to keep diaries as Lucile did, filling page after page with every observation on passing events, with quotes, with questions she longed to ask. No, rather, Annette hoarded her thoughts. Restrained them. Confined them behind her teeth lest they spill forth immoderately. This world, the necessary violence of its change, terrified her enough to suspect her own mind.  
  
How strange, she wanted to say sometimes, how strange in the midst of all this that children could be brought forth, whole and pure and utterly innocent of the world around them. How strange that their own family should know such joy even in the midst of days grown overcast with fear and violence. How strange to have a happy, healthy child born and raised amongst such carnage, such wreckage: the torn and broken bodies littering the Tuileries, the September streets running wet with blood and stinking like a slaughterhouse, a war seeming close upon their very doorstep with the defeat at Verdun, and the breathless weeks of silent prayer that followed until the news of Valmy. Yet Horace bloomed amongst them, Horace, a babe of happy disposition and rounded limbs, of burbling laughter and dark, twinkling eyes like his father’s. He would be cradled as happily against the great, firm swell of Danton’s chest as in the crook of Robespierre’s slender, bird-boned arm. There was something in Annette, some wild part of her she had never known before, that saw all this and wanted to seize him back, to shelter him from their attentions, though she could not have said what it was other than some vague sense of danger. But Lucile was calm as ever, writing in the corner, more father at times than mother and happy enough to leave Camille to fuss over their son, to lean upon his friends and shelter himself beneath the aegis of their power, their greatness, their love and the pride they took in him and this child who was his flesh and his blood.  
  
Over a quiet, subdued dinner one night, a night when even Danton’s booming voice was no more than a soft and distant rumble, Claude spoke. He said that he had read once of how life springs from death. How the fields upon which great battles are held are often those on which the meadow grass grows thick and tall and wild, shooting forth with the brightest of flowers, nourished by the blood of the fallen.  
  
Surely, she thought it must be so, too, for Horace: his brightness and his beauty, his vibrancy, succured by all the blood that had fallen.  
  


**Ventôse. Germinal.**

  
_Demeter_, Camille had called her once, but Annette was powerless after all. Demeter brought men and gods to their knees, reduced civilisations to nothing more than dust and bone and the bare and howling wind. It had been hubris to ever fashion herself after such divinity, to think that she, but a simple woman, could have common cause with a goddess. Like all who commit hubris, Annette was now bound to learn her lesson from it. No Demeter, she, but more akin to boastful Niobe. What foolishness, her pride! Before her very eyes the flesh fled from Lucile’s bones, making of her whiteness something less than marble and more like the grey-tinted wax of a candle made from too many offcuts; her eyes dulled ‘til they were like the dead, wooden eyes of a child’s hand-stitched doll, underscored with the charcoal sweeps of sleepless nights. And Camille! His hair grown wild and tangled where he sank his fingers deep to pull and tear it, his black eyes fever-bright. His clothes, which once drew the eye to the strength of his shoulders and the narrowness of his waist, were now so loose that at times he looked no more than a boy clad in his father’s castoff clothes. Oh, that she could cast herself over them. Stretch herself so thin yet so strong that no arrow could pierce her to find them.  
  
There were no gods, Annette thought, not anymore. Only men cut adrift from one another, lost but reaching for an embrace, to find some peace, some steadiness, a place and a person to call home in these storm-tossed seas, on this red and rising tide. She watched Camille. How all his dreams groaned and strained beneath the onslaught of death, of rumour. How he fell at last, swallowed up by those raging waters, reaching for allies whose hands escaped him. Marat dead and gone, Danton wild with grief at Gabrielle’s death and finally withdrawing from them all to play with his child-bride Louise. And Robespierre, Robespierre…finally less like a drowning man, and more like a cold and distant light.  
  
“I cannot reach him anymore,” Camille said one night. “He is turning into someone else. We all are. But Robespierre…”  
  
“If anyone can reach him,” Annette said quietly. “It is you.”  
  
“A man who is incorruptible. Untouchable,” Camille replied. And then, with an expression like the passing of clouds across the face of the moon, “To all but one man.”  
  
That, Annette supposed, was the moment she knew. The moment she understood: it was the boy who did it, who did all of it. The boy who changed everything. Robespierre’s boy. That dark and vicious shadow. That monstrous beauty. Camille’s echo. His copy. His replacement. Saint-Just.  
  
It was the boy who burned, now, the brightest star in the constellation Robespierre navigated by.  
  
He burned, oh how he burned, as all cold things are wont to do.

  
*** **

  
_I have been happy,_ Annette thought when they came for Camille, _and now I am being punished._  
  
Those frivolous joys: a groaning table filled with friends, the simple pleasure of holding her grandson, the temerity of her love and of her desire.  
  
_I am being punished,_ Annette thought again, when they came for Lucile, _I have been happy in a sorrowful world._  
  
Grief, however, had a way of transforming into rage as lead is transmuted into gold. Were she a girl still, Annette might have wept and wailed, she might have thought to throw herself into the Seine. Indeed, if anything tethered her to life in those days, those scant few days after they came for Lucile, it was the responsibilities she had as a woman: to poor Louise, a widow at sixteen, to poor Horace, an orphan at less than two. What could she do, then, but wake each morning like some clockwork automaton? What could she do, when Claude could barely lift his head from the pillow for all the weight of his grief, but rise and set the house in order and forbid the domestics to weep. What could she do but feed and change and bathe Horace, and Danton’s little boys? To do much the same for Louise, so stunned and mired in her loss and confusion that at one point Annette was forced to help her change just as if she were a little girl, to wash that barely-budded body that had borne Danton’s weight- not only with her body, but with her very soul- to run the comb through her fine, golden hair and so by stages bring her back to the light, bring her back to herself.  
  
Perhaps it was all that which cleared Annette’s head. Which allowed the rage to come, like water carving its inevitable path through stone. She could not grieve, she found, through all this hatred.  
  
_Robespierre,_ she wrote.  
  
_Is it not enough to have assassinated your best friend; do you desire also the blood of his wife, of my daughter? Your master, Fouquier-Tinville, has just ordered her to be led to the scaffold. Two hours more and she will not be in existence. Robespierre, if you are not a tiger in human shape, if Camille’s blood has not inebriated you to the point of loosing your reason entirely, if you recall still our evenings of intimacy, if you recall to yourself the caresses you lavished upon the little Horace, and how you delighted to hold him upon your knees, and if you remember that you were to have been my son-in-law, spare an innocent victim! But if your fury is that of a lion, come and take us also, myself, Adèle, and Horace. Come and tear us away with your hands still reeking in the blood of Camille. Come, come, and let us be reunited in one single tomb._  
  
It was far easier to tell him how she hated him than how she hated herself.  
  
That part she confessed only to God.  
  


*****

  
Lucile, they said, died like a Roman.  
  
They said it as if such things matter to a mother.  
  
_This world,_ Annette thought, when her throat was too raw to scream any longer, when she had wept ‘til no more tears could come. _This world and these men. How I despise them. How I wish to be an eagle. How I would devour Robespierre, how I would bloody my beak with his liver and wake each day just for the pleasure of doing so again._

**Thermidor**

When the tellers of tales speak of vengeance, they speak of its sweetness and its savour. Revenge, they say, is a strong drug for the senses. Revenge is as addictive as the lingering sweetness of maraschino imbibed from Mirabeau’s too-generous hands. And oh, in those scant weeks following Lucile’s murder, following Camille’s, how Annette longed for a draught of it to drown this mindless, directionless rage. To fill to the brim the vast, empty cavern hollowed in her breast where her heart once beat. How she longed to be drunk on it, wild as a bacchante, tearing man and beast apart with her taloned hands. How she longed to feast upon it ‘til she was glutted and fattened on its flesh and its marrow. If the charnel smell of the guillotine churning through its victims, innocent and guilty alike, ought to have turned her stomach, it seemed in those days only to provoke her hunger.  
  
She imagined Robespierre behind the dark screen of every blink of her eyes, imagined him standing upon that platform, his shoes marking bloody footsteps upon the wood like a confession of his sins. Would he go mad, as Camille had, thinking of the woman he was rumoured to love? Would he twist himself in their arms ‘til his shirt tore, ‘til he was slick with the sweat and panic of struggle, knowing she might be dragged to this same bitter end? Or would he mourn that boy? Would he look upon that young, proud form ascending the steps and grieve at losing him as he had never grieved for Camille? Might he think but once more, looking upon those dark and lustrous curls so similar to Camille’s, of his oldest friend? Might he wish for them all a different path? Could he? What was left of him, the man who had been tipsy and giggling at their table, who had cradled Horace in his arms and sung him lullabies, who spoke in such animated tones of peace and justice?  
  
Now that time itself had come.  
  
_Leave off, leave off,_ Claude had begged her, from the first hour of the news of his fall. _Have you not eaten your fill, Madame? Have you not had enough of this bloody work? Is it not time to stop this voracious consumption and rest instead?_  
  
To which: _no,_ she had said, _no, it will never be done. I will die empty. I will die with this hunger still inside me._  
  
Yet now, as Annette stood in the crowd and gazed up at that monstrous machine towering above her, she felt so full. She felt as though she had ate and ate and ate ‘til all she had devoured filled her belly like clay. As though, if she were to take so much as a single bite more it would do nothing but come back up again, thick and sour. The crowd gathered all around her, laughing and joking, summer flowers in hands and smiles smeared across faces: Robespierre’s great, beloved people, his general will, they who had claimed him for their own and held him to their breasts for all these brief and endless years. Yet now they stood so ready, so willing, to sacrifice him upon the altar. Annette alone amongst them- what jest- felt the tears in the corners of her eyes like a myriad of hot needles.  
  
What did she see of him now, this Robespierre whom she once made gentle as a lamb and had made over again as fierce and bloodthirsty as a tiger? Nothing, now, but a broken, half-dead thing barely able to stand. Without his wig he was almost unrecognisable, his tawny hair lank and dark with sweat where it showed around the bandages circling his face. A nun, they called him, and she winced in spite of herself, wondering what they had called Camille as he shrieked and wept and fell trembling against Danton’s great, wide breast. How their bitter vitriol had curdled Lucile’s brave virtue into weakness and foolishness. And the boy, Saint-Just? The one she had carved into an idol built only to receive her hatred, who she had called a shadow and an echo of better men? Now he seemed to her no more than a youth, that thing Camille had called pride no more than a facade constructed from the heroes they had all tried to live up to. Seeing him thus, with his long curls shorn, his shirt torn to show the thin hairlessness of his chest, the bruises of rough-handling upon the pallor of his skin, Annette half thought to tend him with her own trembling hands, for his master could not touch him now and really, really, they were all so terribly young.  
  
She could not turn away, then, even had she wanted to: the crowd was too thick, too close-pressed for her to move away. These people frightened her: their vengeance, more than the scene before her. Frightened her because she had been one of them but an hour or so before. Annette did not want to move, though, to deny herself the moment when it all, finally, came to an end, or abandon them here without a single familiar face to look upon them. And so she held her ground and let no man push her aside or take her place before that gallows. She folded her hands before her and watched, immovable, as one after another fell, as the guards twisted that poor fellow they now called a man-eater, a tiger, a raving beast- though he seemed to Annette no more terrifying than those sad and starving creatures they kept in the zoo- onto the plank. She watched when the boy, carrying himself with all the rigour of youth and the gravitas of man, mounted the steps; watched Robespierre, too, his face rendered expressionless by injury so that only his eyes conveyed the depths of his sorrow, the height of his pride in this friend. There was something about that gaze she could not place, something that terrified her and filled her heart all at once, that she had never seen his eyes rest for even so much as a moment on anyone else that way, and she had known him well for a time.  
  
And then, at last, it was Robespierre’s turn: this man she had turned into a monster, this man she once sought to tie to her family by blood, who had cut himself loose from them in the spilling of it. Annette waited for the old rage to come back, the old hatred. She waited for some taste of vicious joy long anticipated. There was only the beating of her heart and the onslaught of memories: Robespierre young and whole and happy, Robespierre’s terrible poetry after Lucile and Camille’s wedding, the tender kiss he once pressed to Lucile’s forehead when she was worried for Camille, Camille in his arms and Danton with his arms slung over both their shoulders to drag them to his chest, Robespierre with Horace sleeping in his arms or suckling at the thin fingertip he placed gently to his lip. God, how Annette wanted to despise him, how she felt she ought to, but all she could think of now was how small and thin and lonely he looked upon the platform, how cruel must be the wound to still soak through his bandages, how his eyes now turned from the people who despised him to the God he had never abandoned.  
  
Perhaps, she thought, he sought some final glimpse of his dead friends, or perhaps he felt her gaze upon him, for at last Robespierre lowered his eyes. Dim and near-blind as they had been in life, they still seemed to find her face. She smiled a small, tight smile. She thought, perhaps, he would have returned it if he could.  
  
He lay at last upon the plank as if to rest and she, closing her eyes, at last felt that knot inside her give way with a tug and a the coolness of tears over her hot cheeks and a sob lost in the howl of the crowd.   
  
_Oh,_ she thought, _oh my poor son. Oh my beloved children._

**Author's Note:**

> **General Notes:**
> 
> My sources for this piece are largely the same as for _Les Saisons_, with some notable additions. The overall 'mood' of the piece, and particularly of Annette's shifting consciousness when it comes to the Revolution, draws on Timothy Tackett's _The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution_. The characterisation of she and Lucile's relationship with Camille is drawn largely from [their letters](https://melkam.livejournal.com/3701.html) and diary entries sourced at [ohmycamilledesmoulins](https://ohmycamilledesmoulins.tumblr.com/), with thanks again to fanfeline for helping me out with research and idea-checking. I also did my best to convey how amorphous time and events tend to become in circumstances of sustained stress and trauma: hopefully the inaccuracies in this are all the ones that I'm aware of, having placed them there intentionally, and not something I simply missed!__
> 
> _ _ **Specific Notes:**_ _
> 
> _ _ _Marcus Aurelius:_ Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher._ _
> 
> _ __Branle:_ A form of simple, 'rural'/regional dance in France at the time (with other forms practiced in other countries)._ _
> 
> _ __the Pythia:_ Otherwise known as the Oracle of Delphi._ _
> 
> _ __Niobe:_ After boasting of the number of her children, compared to Leto- who had 'only' two, these two children, Artemis and Apollo, slaughtered either all or most of Niobe's. In some myths they leave two alive, in order to make Niobe into Leto's equal._ _
> 
> _ __How I wish to be an eagle...:_ An allusion to the myth of Prometheus and his punishment for stealing heavenly fire for humanity._ _


End file.
